Secretary of State John Kerry has called on American ambassadors around the world to make the fight against climate change a top priority ahead of new UN talks next year.

In his first department-wide policy guidance statement since taking office a year ago, he told his 70,000 staff: “The environment has been one of the central causes of my life.”

“Protecting our environment and meeting the challenge of global climate change is a critical mission for me as our country’s top diplomat,” Kerry said in the letter issued on Friday to all 275 US embassies and across the State Department.

“It’s also a critical mission for all of you: our brave men and women on the frontlines of direct diplomacy,” he added in the document seen by AFP.

Kerry should open the global warming talks at the U.N. by offering the climate a “re-set” button.

Ambassadors taking Kerry’s advice to take “climate change” seriously and work to reduce carbon output might first want to sit down for a heart-to-heart with their boss:

In winter, he [Kerry] goes helicopter skiing while staying at his wife’s Idaho retreat, a 15th-century farmhouse transported from England and reassembled on the banks of the Big Wood River in Sun Valley. In summer, he windsurfs and sails off the coast of Nantucket, where she has another home. The couple have an 18th-century town house in Boston where the kitchen is two stories high. There is a 23-room town house in Washington, an 88-acre Pittsburgh area estate, a private Gulfstream jet and a personal staff of six, including caretakers and a cook.

John Kerry makes Al Gore look like Ed Begley, Jr. Now if we could just figure out how to harness the power of Kerry’s hypocrisy, our energy problems would be solved.

Putin and Medvedev of Russia, above, react after being told John Kerry believes climate change to be the greatest threat the world faces